Contact Email

History

Author Content

Brian Schill's got the right attitude: If city leaders won't schedule a sales tax vote for a new library until next year, then the Library Board will make the most of the delay. The board will use the time to strengthen the case for a new library, making that case as thorough, well-documented and persuasive as they can, board chairman Schill told the Herald. Now, here's another idea about how to put the added months to good use:

With the signing of a project partnership agreement on Monday, the Army Corps of Engineers has formally committed to helping to build the Fargo-Moorhead flood diversion. Just as important, the signing means the Corps now has $450 million to spend. For Grand Forks, these developments are great news. Protecting Fargo-Moorhead from catastrophic flooding is so important, the U.S. government now has promised hundreds of millions of dollars to get the job done.

In their Q&A on today's editorial page, Grand Forks Mayor Mike Brown and City Administrator Todd Feland mull over how forcefully the city should respond to the shortage of affordable housing. You can almost hear their mental gears clicking as they talk possibilities and weigh the odds. Let this editorial be a squirt of psychological WD-40: If Grand Forks' housing situation is such that it's threatening economic growth, then the city should act. Brown and others shouldn't be shy about helping Grand Forks get the housing stock it needs.

You probably didn't go into Election Day thinking that victory was a sure thing. Brown. I doubt everything. You always have doubt—and I think self-doubt is good. It makes you work harder, better. Were you nervous? Brown: Yes. Everything we've built with our community—our ways of "Getting to Yes," our vibrancy, our collaboation—all that was on the line. My legacy, if a person can have one, would have been dismissed. And I have wonderful people doing wonderful work and taking great pride in their work. And so it was my duty to run. Yes, I was worried.

Some policy responses to this week's police shootings and shootings-of-police will take years to put in place. But others can be rolled out within months. Here are two, both of them drawn from a striking op-ed in The Washington Post titled "The low-hanging fruit of police reform" (June 20). And both of them could help start rebuilding trust in police — especially among minorities, where for reasons ranging from tragically justified to shockingly unjustified, that trust has eroded.

There's little chance that Eliot Glassheim will get anywhere with his criticism of John Hoeven's coyness regarding Donald Trump. Glassheim, the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party's candidate for Senate, "has been working hard to hammer Hoeven on Donald Trump, the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee and a man Hoeven has said he'll 'support' but not endorse," the Herald reported Sunday. But Glassheim's political weakness is exactly why Hoeven should take the complaint about Trump to heart. And act on it.

When two sides compromise, neither gets everything it wants. Which is why the U.S. Senate should pass the new bipartisan compromise on labeling food with genetically modified ingredients. The bill requires this labeling—a fact that upsets many scientists and others in the food industry, who say singling out GMO ingredients at all caters to anti-scientific paranoia.

In the mail last week was an edition of the Herald dated July 6, 1909. A reader sent us the relic, and among the front-page stories was one that listed nationwide deaths related to fireworks. The numbers are surprising. Citing statistics from the Chicago Tribune, the Herald that day reported there were at least 19 American deaths directly attributed to fireworks.

UND's new president, Mark Kennedy, brings a background in both business and politics to his new job. But when running a state university in North Dakota, it's not enough to be good at those things. You also must commit to the trait that's found in the place in the state's culture where those two skills intersect: openness. It's a vital commitment to make, surely one of the most important of Kennedy's tenure. To understand why, he should look to other presidents' experience, including that of North Dakota State University President Dean Bresciani just down the road.

Dean Bresciani, president of North Dakota State University, has been put on probation by the state higher-ed board, which basically made the renewal of Bresciani's contract contingent on him fulfilling a few conditions. So, what should Bresciani do? Here's our suggestion in one word: Comply. Bresciani should accept the board's conditions with grace and vow to fulfill them. Then he should keep his promise. Problem solved.